


The Brightest of Their Age

by bloodbright



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: M/M, Masturbation, Necrophilia, Other, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 05:58:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5956261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodbright/pseuds/bloodbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They found the Inquisitor’s body five days into the search: at the bottom of a ravine, three arrows in his back and one hand missing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Brightest of Their Age

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: azalea - fragile and ephemeral passion.

The Inquisitor was unfailingly gentle and courteous; he smiled at everyone. If he smiled a little longer at Dorian, it was by a margin so small as to be nearly imperceptible, but the diminutiveness of the difference did nothing to reduce the temptation to make an experiment of it, as delicate as any undertaken by a magister in a tower: to measure how long he smiled, and how deeply, and to see if it could be made to last longer by the careful tweaking of any one of a number of variables.

Dorian knew better, of course, and most of the time he even managed to do better; he allowed himself to flirt exactly as much as he would’ve with anyone with that face and those hands, and no more; and there were worse things than to have someone kind and handsome and friendly to think of at night.

\----

They found the Inquisitor’s body five days into the search: at the bottom of a ravine, three arrows in his back and one hand missing. After that it was almost easy: with the body to work with, half-rotted as it was, tracking the missing hand was child’s play, the sort of thing any half-trained apprentice in Tevinter might have managed. 

It was in a spelled chest under the false bottom of a wagon in a caravan that only appeared to be unarmed. They opened it after the battle was over and found the Anchor quiescent, dimmer than Dorian had ever seen it, though it flared again, very briefly, when Solas touched it.

Dorian dreamed, that night: the Inquisitor was there, in his clothes that were neat and well-made but a little worn, a little too dull for Dorian’s taste, and he took Dorian’s face in his big hands and kissed him. Dorian woke up crying, and hard.

\----

There weren’t many restful nights after that. Inquisitor or no, the Breach still split the sky, and there remained the issue of the rifts busy spewing demons into the countryside.

But none of them could make the Anchor do anything more than brighten momentarily. Solas tried for exactly three days before departing for parts unknown. Vivienne tried, and Morrigan, and Fiona, and every other ex-Circle refugee with the faintest whisper of power; Varric made arrangements for Hawke to make an appearance, and when he failed, he disappeared for some time and showed up again with a tiny Dalish blood mage who introduced herself as Merrill and also failed.

By this time, Dorian had tried everything he could think of, from candles with his own blood in the wax to half-remembered nursery rhymes. Skyhold began to empty, slowly at first and then faster and faster, until the only ones who remained were those who had nowhere else to go and the last few who remembered the flight from Haven and the Inquisitor walking out of the snow like a miracle.

A second miracle was not forthcoming.

Dorian had the library to himself again. It was very late, late enough to become early again though there were many hours yet until sunrise; with no one there to see him, discomfort had won out against vanity and he’d wrapped himself in a blanket against the bitter southern cold.

“If only you could see me now,” he said out loud, and didn’t know whether he was talking to his friends back in Tevinter or the man whose death had left a void in the world that no one else could fill. 

He’d tried very hard not to think of the Inquisitor, when there was so much work to be done; he would’ve gently chided them for letting their grief get in the way of helping all the people depending on them, and then set to work himself when he had a dozen willing volunteers at hand. He would’ve been an insufferable martyr if he hadn’t been so easy to love.

But now he was a martyr indeed; he was gone—most of him was gone, and Dorian was left here with the profane remnant of him, torn between wanting to remember and wanting to forget; and he’d denied himself his usual methods of forgetting for too long: not so much as a swallow of wine in weeks while he alternated tearing through book after useless book with arguing with each new mage, and even longer since he’d had a tumble with someone pretty and willing.

There was no one to see, and Dorian had never been very good at self-denial.

He was used to being quick, and he’d shed the cape and jacket hours ago. It was a simple matter of undoing the laces and shoving his hand down the front of his pants. He wasn’t hard yet, but he’d get there soon enough; the first stroke made him give a hissing breath between his teeth.

It had been too long since he’d been touched by someone else. He skipped through his usual collection of fantasies and memories but couldn't settle on one: Iron Bull’s massive chest and what Dorian imagined was a proportional endowment; the last orgy he’d had before leaving Tevinter; the tall dark server who’d bent him over and fucked him hard in the filthy alley behind his third-favorite tavern in Minrathous. His eyes were open but unfocused, attention turned inward, until his careless sweeping glance caught on the Inquisitor’s hand on the table and his cock jerked in his hand.

He groaned once, too loud in the silence, and stopped dead for a moment.

He was beginning to sweat. He pushed the blanket away with his free arm, then gritted his teeth, rested his forehead on the table and closed his eyes. Anonymous bodies, faces seen only in passing, past encounters; but he couldn’t shake the knowledge of the hand on the table—half-imagined that he could feel the heat of it on the side of his face. He reached for it.

The first touch was a shock. The hand was still warm, unnaturally so; the power that had rotted it from the inside out in life had preserved it in death, so that the flesh remained soft, the staff calluses still rough, the knuckles still a little reddened despite the green glow. Dorian pressed his own palm to the back of it; it was a little larger than his own, the fingers long and graceful, the Trevelyan signet still on the little finger. No one had wanted to take it off.

He wrapped his hand around the Inquisitor’s; picked it up, and wrapped it around his own cock.

It was a little clumsy, but not more so than a thoroughly drunken fumble. With his eyes closed, he could almost pretend that it was another person—that it was the Inquisitor himself, as it might have been had Dorian flung caution to the wind. He tried to think of that, then—the Inquisitor’s generous mouth, the breadth of his shoulders, the warmth in his voice—but the truth was that they’d been slipping from his memory for months, and besides—

The sharp end where the bone had been snapped off scratched a red welt across his stomach. He gasped. His eyes snapped open, and then he was staring at the white gleam of bone at the wrist, the raw flesh unnaturally exposed where it had been hacked off.

His cock was leaking from the head, smearing across the Inquisitor’s fingers. It was stupid to be doing this here—stupid to be doing it at all; anyone could walk in and see, and then they would know—they called Tevinter depraved but not even there would it have occurred to anyone to—do this—

He was panting open-mouthed, hand moving again, moving faster. His grip slipped and he could have stopped then, except he couldn’t; his eyes were fixed on the Inquisitor’s—the dismembered hand of Andraste’s own herald, the poisonous green glow visible between his fingers—

He came in a blinding rush so hard the muscles of his stomach wanted to cramp.

He slumped there, panting, the hand thoughtlessly cradled in his lap, until he shifted—it brushed him—he recoiled and flung it convulsively away from him. It rolled across the table and fell to the ground.

He’d had some stupid ideas, but this was the worst of them all. All of it: leaving Tevinter and coming south, trying to save the world and follow a good man, trying not to fall in love and trying to carry on; and where had it gotten him? Alone, and useless, and proving every rumor of his countrymen’s degeneracy true.

He ground the heels of his hands hard into his stinging eyes. Then after a long moment he got up and went to it; picked it carefully up, wiped it off on his shirt—growing threadbare; in Tevinter he’d have thrown it out long ago—and placed it back on the table.

The Anchor still glowed steadily, unmoved by what had just happened. Overhead, the Breach widened.


End file.
